IT Executives From Three Wall Street Companies - Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch and American Express - Look Back on 9/11 and Take Stock of Where They Are Now

By Sarah D. Scalet

Sun, September 01, 2002 — CIO — From the American Express executive library on the 51st floor of 3 World Financial Center, the ferries crossing from New Jersey look like toy boats, and Manhattan seems clean and orderly. With plush leather furniture and book-lined walls, with atlases arranged on the coffee table and brass telescopes at the window, everything about the room’s decor is supposed to make those who use it feel invincible.

That would be a big change from a year ago. Because of suspected structural damage to the building when the adjacent World Trade Center towers fell and because of questions about the future of the financial district, no one knew who if anyone might return to this room.

On Saturday, Sept. 15, 2001, American Express CIO Glen Salow stood in Jersey City, N.J., and looked across the Hudson to New York’s altered skyline. It was 7 a.m., and he had just the night before returned from Minneapolis.

"It was the first time I’d physically seen what had happened, saw the horrible smoke coming up," he recalls on a day in May two weeks after he returned to his old office. "I saw our building. It had shrapnel sticking out of it, which if you didn’t know [you] would think was actually our girders bent out. I looked at our building and said, It’s only a building."

Of course, that wasn’t how American Express executives acted when they staged a triumphant return to headquarters this spring, a move which should be complete by the end of this month. Step by step, Wall Street, the state of mind, is being painfully reconstructed. But Wall Street the place will never, can never and should never be the same.

With IPO cash dried up, investor confidence down and layoffs underway, 2001 would have been tough for financial services. Then came Sept. 11.

Thousands of people were killed. Tens of thousands more lost their jobs, and countless others had their foundations shaken. In hard dollars, the attacks on the World Trade Center cost New York City $83 billion, according to an economic impact analysis by the New York City Partnership, cited by the General Accounting Office as the most comprehensive one completed.

"In a lot of comments I hear from the Street, they sort of view this past year as a lost year," says Rob Gould, a PWC Consulting financial services partner, who participated in the study.

Cantor Fitzgerald, a small financial services and trading company perched atop one of the towers, came to represent the human tragedy of the attacks on the World Trade Center. But next door, three multinationals with headquarters in the World Financial Center, American Express, Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch came to represent what the future of Wall Street might look like.

Additional details emerged Friday about the effect of the collapse of 7 World Trade Center on investigations being conducted by the New York offices of the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, both of which were housed in the building.

The SEC has not quantified the number of active cases in which substantial files were destroyed. Reuters news service and the Los Angeles Times published reports estimating them at 3,000 to 4,000. They include the agency's major inquiry into the manner in which investment banks divvied up hot shares of initial public offerings during the high-tech boom.

The EEOC said documents from about 45 active cases were missing and could not be easily retrieved from any backup system. One of these cases was a sexual harassment charge filed on Sept. 10 against Morgan Stanley, one of the prime corporate victims of the World Trade Center disaster.

A statement from the commission said that "we are confident that we will not lose any significant investigation or case as a result of the loss of our building in New York. No one whom we have sued or whose conduct we have been investigating should doubt our resolve to continue our pursuit of justice in every such matters."

But the short-term problems will be immense, said Gregory Joseph of New York's Law Offices of Gregory Joseph.

"Court papers can largely be reconstituted, but work product has to be reconstructed," he said. "This will cause delays in court and will require significant reduplication of effort." Some data, he added, "won't be recreatable."

"Ongoing investigations at the New York SEC will be dramatically affected because so much of their work is paper-intensive," said Max Berger of New York's Bernstein Litowitz Berger & Grossmann. "This is a disaster for these cases."

"The SEC will have some difficulty, but the bounce-back will come relatively easily," predicts Harvey Goldschmid, Dwight professor of law at Columbia University and former general counsel of the SEC. "It will throw things off for a period of time, but most of what's important can be regained. They will have to reconstruct these documents. But most of this was backed up or in Washington. They've lost some transcripts but even they're available."

EEOC Records Destroyed

The EEOC's New York office, which was housed in 7 World Trade Center, sustained no loss of life. But all the agency's records were destroyed.

Many of the files are backed up in the computer system, but a substantial number of documents are simply gone, said Spencer Lewis, the EEOC district director. Depositions and notes were not scanned into computers and are lost. With depositions and interviews, the agency will be contacting court reporters "and hoping that they've got them so we can reconstruct files," Lewis said. This covers about 45 active cases, including a recent action against Morgan Stanley.

But employment litigators believe the effect here, too, will be transitory.

"The EEOC is decimated as far as office space goes," but any problems are "only short-term," said Michael Weber of the New York office of Littler Mendelson. "They will get back to business." The agencies will be seeking documents from the private law firms and defendants, Weber notes. "My sense is that we will cooperate," he noted. "Our goal is not to take advantage of this catastrophe."

"A lot of their records they'll have online, so they'll just reprint them out," adds Harkins. "The EEOC is in a better position than the SEC, because the SEC has a lot more confidential files."

National Emergency will not work now, it may well have
on Sept 13th or so of 2001, but not now. Too many people openly
discuss this sort of thing, saying they won't sit back and take it.
I used to never hear that kind of talk, not I hear it often and in
just about every place one could imagine. Grocery Store, and
Sporting Goods Stores, Convenience stores, you name it. Men and
women alike form all backgrounds.

Can I assume that they are far more people willing to get
physical if need be, or are they merely blowing smoke?

Because without somebody (=AIG) being willing to play the role
of the mark in this scam, the inflation of this housing derivatives
bubble CANNOT happen.

Maybe there was method in his madness, so to speak.

Quote:

Testy Conflict With Goldman Helped Push A.I.G. to Edge

By GRETCHEN MORGENSON and LOUISE STORY
Published: February 6, 2010

Billions of dollars were at stake when 21 executives of Goldman Sachs and the American International Group convened a conference call on Jan. 28, 2008, to try to resolve a rancorous dispute that had been escalating for months.

A.I.G. had long insured complex mortgage securities owned by Goldman and other firms against possible defaults. With the housing crisis deepening, A.I.G., once the world’s biggest insurer, had already paid Goldman $2 billion to cover losses the bank said it might suffer.

A.I.G. executives wanted some of its money back, insisting that Goldman — like a homeowner overestimating the damages in a storm to get a bigger insurance payment — had inflated the potential losses. Goldman countered that it was owed even more, while also resisting consulting with third parties to help estimate a value for the securities.

After more than an hour of debate, the two sides on the call signed off with nothing settled, according to internal A.I.G. documents and an audio recording reviewed by The New York Times.

Behind-the-scenes disputes over huge sums are common in banking, but the standoff between A.I.G. and Goldman would become one of the most momentous in Wall Street history. Well before the federal government bailed out A.I.G. in September 2008, Goldman’s demands for billions of dollars from the insurer helped put it in a precarious financial position by bleeding much-needed cash. That ultimately provoked the government to step in.

[.....]

In just the year before the A.I.G. bailout, Goldman collected more than $7 billion from A.I.G. And Goldman received billions more after the rescue. Though other banks also benefited, Goldman received more taxpayer money, $12.9 billion, than any other firm.

In addition, according to two people with knowledge of the positions, a portion of the $11 billion in taxpayer money that went to Société Générale, a French bank that traded with A.I.G., was subsequently transferred to Goldman under a deal the two banks had struck.

Goldman stood to gain from the housing market’s implosion because in late 2006, the firm had begun to make huge trades that would pay off if the mortgage market soured. The further mortgage securities’ prices fell, the greater were Goldman’s profits.

In its dispute with A.I.G., Goldman invariably argued that the securities in dispute were worth less than A.I.G. estimated — and in many cases, less than the prices at which other dealers valued the securities.

The pricing dispute, and Goldman’s bets that the housing market would decline, has left some questioning whether Goldman had other reasons for lowballing the value of the securities that A.I.G. had insured, said Bill Brown, a law professor at Duke University who is a former employee of both Goldman and A.I.G.

The dispute between the two companies, he said, “was the tip of the iceberg of this whole crisis.”

“It’s not just who was right and who was wrong,” Mr. Brown said. “I also want to know their motivations. There could have been an incentive for Goldman to say, ‘A.I.G., you owe me more money.’ ”

[.....]

A November 2008 analysis by BlackRock, a leading asset management firm, noted that Goldman’s valuations of the securities that A.I.G. insured were “consistently lower than third-party prices.”

To be sure, many now agree that A.I.G. was reckless during the mortgage mania. The firm, once the world’s largest insurer, had written far more insurance than it could have possibly paid if a national mortgage debacle occurred — as, in fact, it did.

Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of the relationship between Goldman and A.I.G. was that without the insurer to provide credit insurance, the investment bank could not have generated some of its enormous profits betting against the mortgage market. And when that market went south, A.I.G. became its biggest casualty — and Goldman became one of the biggest beneficiaries.

Longstanding Ties

For decades, A.I.G. and Goldman had a deep and mutually beneficial relationship, and at one point in the 1990s, they even considered merging. At around the same time, in 1998, A.I.G. entered a lucrative new business: insuring the least risky portions of corporate loans or other assets that were bundled into securities.

A.I.G.’s financial products unit, led by Joseph J. Cassano, was behind the expansion. To reduce its own risks in the transactions, the company structured deals so that it would not have to make early payments to clients when securities began to sour. That changed around 2003, however, when A.I.G. began insuring portions of subprime mortgage deals. A lawyer for Mr. Cassano said his client would not comment for this article. A.I.G. also declined to comment.

Alan Frost, a managing director in Mr. Cassano’s unit, negotiated scores of mortgage deals around Wall Street that included a complicated sequence of events for when an insurance payment on a distressed asset came due.

The terms, described by several A.I.G. trading partners, stated that A.I.G. would post payments under two or three circumstances: if mortgage bonds were downgraded, if they were deemed to have lost value, or if A.I.G.’s own credit rating was downgraded. If all of those things happened, A.I.G. would have to make even larger payments.

Mr. Frost referred questions to his lawyer, who declined to comment.

Traders loved Mr. Frost’s deals because they would pay out quickly if anything went wrong. Mr. Frost cut many of his deals with two Goldman traders, Jonathan Egol and Ram Sundaram, who had negative views of the housing market. They had made A.I.G. a central part of some of their trading strategies.

Mr. Egol structured a group of deals — known as Abacus — so that Goldman could benefit from a housing collapse. Many of them were actually packages of A.I.G. insurance written against mortgage bonds, indicating that Mr. Egol and Goldman believed that A.I.G. would have to make large payments if the housing market ran aground. About $5.5 billion of Mr. Egol’s deals still sat on A.I.G.’s books when the insurer was bailed out.

“Al probably did not know it, but he was working with the bears of Goldman,” a former Goldman salesman, who requested anonymity so he would not jeopardize his business relationships, said of Mr. Frost. “He was signing A.I.G. up to insure trades made by people with really very negative views” of the housing market.

Mr. Sundaram’s trades represented another large part of Goldman’s business with A.I.G. According to five former Goldman employees, Mr. Sundaram used financing from other banks like Société Générale and Calyon to purchase less risky mortgage securities from competitors like Merrill Lynch and then insure the assets with A.I.G. — helping fatten the mortgage pipeline that would prove so harmful to Wall Street, investors and taxpayers. In October 2008, just after A.I.G. collapsed, Goldman made Mr. Sundaram a partner.

Through Société Générale, Goldman was also able to buy more insurance on mortgage securities from A.I.G., according to a former A.I.G. executive with direct knowledge of the deals. A spokesman for Société Générale declined to comment.

It is unclear how much Goldman bought through the French bank, but A.I.G. documents show that Goldman was involved in pricing half of Société Générale’s $18.6 billion in trades with A.I.G. and that the insurer’s executives believed that Goldman pressed Société Générale to also demand payments.

[.....]

By July 2007, when Goldman demanded its first payment from A.I.G. — $1.8 billion — the investment bank had already taken trading positions that would pay out if the mortgage market weakened, according to seven former Goldman employees.

The insurer put up $450 million on Aug. 10, 2007, to appease Goldman, but A.I.G. remained resistant in the following months and, according to internal messages, was convinced that Goldman was also pushing other trading partners to ask A.I.G. for payments.

On Nov. 1, 2007, for example, an e-mail message from Mr. Cassano, the head of A.I.G. Financial Products, to Elias Habayeb, an A.I.G. accounting executive, said that a payment demand from Société Générale had been “spurred by GS calling them.”

By the end of November 2007, Goldman was holding $2 billion in cash from A.I.G. when the insurer notified Goldman that it was disputing the firm’s calculations and seeking a return of $1.56 billion. Goldman refused, the documents show.

In many of these deals, Goldman was trading for other parties and taking a fee. As the mortgage market declined, Goldman paid some of these parties while waiting for A.I.G. to meet its demands, the Goldman spokesman said. But one reason those parties were owed money on the deals was that Goldman had marked down the securities.

[.....]

By the spring of 2008, A.I.G.’s dispute with Goldman was just one of its many woes. Mr. Cassano was pushed out in March and the company’s defenses against the growing demand for payments faltered. By the end of August 2008, A.I.G. had posted $19.7 billion in cash to its trading partners, including Goldman, according to financial filings.

Over that summer, A.I.G. had tried, unsuccessfully, to cancel its insurance contracts with the trading partners. But Goldman, according to interviews with former A.I.G. executives, would allow that only if it also got to keep the $7 billion it had already received from A.I.G. Goldman wanted to keep the initial insurance payouts and the securities in order to profit from any future rebound.

In addition to offering to cancel its own contracts, Goldman offered to buy all of the insurance A.I.G. had written for several other banks at severely distressed prices, according to three people briefed on the discussions.

Negotiating with Goldman to void the A.I.G. insurance was especially difficult, Federal Reserve Board documents show, because the firm did not own the underlying bonds. As a result, Goldman had little incentive to compromise.

On Aug. 18, 2008, Goldman’s equity research department published an in-depth report on A.I.G. The analysts advised the firm’s clients to avoid the stock because of a “downward spiral which is likely to ensue as more actual cash losses emanate” from the insurer’s financial products unit.

On the matter of whether A.I.G. could unwind its troublesome insurance on mortgage securities at a discount, the Goldman report noted that if a trading partner “is not in a position of weakness, why would it accept anything less than the full amount of protection for which it had paid?”

A.I.G. shares fell 6 percent the day the report was published. Three weeks later, the United States government agreed to pour billions of dollars in taxpayer money into the insurer to keep it from collapsing.

The government would soon settle the yearlong dispute between Goldman and A.I.G., with Goldman receiving full value for its bets. The federal bailout locked in the paper losses of those deals for A.I.G. The prices on many of those securities have since rebounded.

Okay, so now larger light bulbs are beginning to illuminate over my head. 9/11 as a purely financial coup, not the poorly-guarded secret passion play of "stealing oil", "PNAC ambition" or "Rambo-style militarism."

Hence, all the "incriminating" evidence of Rumsfeld's 'missile' comments, Bush's overacted ineptitude, missing WMD (who's 'discovery' would have been soooo easy to fudge), Cheney's 'bad guy' act and war game involvement, narrow focus on towers 1 and 2, misdirection about missing planes, debates over 'shot down /crashed', etc. Was it all about traumatic misdirection of public emotion/attention, and the taking down of the SEC and other records in WTC 7, period? ("Oh, my people - we stupidly stored all of our records in the volcano, never realizing it would one day erupt." said the Mayan chief. "Now we cannot prove to the Gods that we already sacrificed 10,000 of you. We must start over. The line forms on the left.")

Along with, of course, the inevitable cottage industries: militaristic expansion, over-stuffing of defense coffers (which concurrently adds to the already out of control national debt), erosion of rights and liberties, a hyper-security state, the bulldozing of Iraq, further destabilization of the whole Middle East (and the concurrent stabilizing of Israel's security). And the less-obvious negative effect goals - further stretching, ranks depletion and demoralizing of the US military, further imaging of the US as a "dangerous policeman" (corrupt cops), which must some day step aside or "accept global oversight" (Serpico). The concept of a global police will not tarnish as much as the concept that the "corrupt" nature of this particular one is the real problem. Maybe we need a version of Interpol (the Hollywood glamorized, 'highly efficient' Earth Cops who always get their man or bring down the evil corporation) on steroids, if you will.

Meanwhile, in the background, the masses are finally, slowly coming to the "surprising" revelation that US politics is all talk and no substance. "All hopey no changy", as one of my favorite pundits recently said. Less confidence in national governance also plays well into the NWO's hands. As the back and forth pendulum swing most of us here have noted for decades is slowly assimilated into the popular consciousness, and even the MSM will be allowed to take notice that "this just isn't working anymore." Gradually, additional 3rd, 4th and 5th party movements will arise, to dilute the political landscape as much as possible, until a pre-war Iraq style of socio-political setup of a dozen (dozens? hundreds?) of separate parties shows the US people that "we just don't know how to govern ourselves anymore."

But let's also remember it's always wise to be at least a bit suspicious of anything that appears in print in the NewYork Times.

Their record for truth is not a good one......

Unfortunately, the original version of that does not contain FD's highlighted bullet points. The average reader won't make as many conclusive connections. And I think it's safe to say that wasn't on Page One.

Make sure you're in position to profit from the cure before you fully reveal the disease from which you've been profiting.

I would also like to watch for any AIG employees who die in "1 car crashes" over the next few years. To those who had ring-side seats to a massive financial disaster averted at the last minute, this has to smell funny enough to talk about at the water cooler most Monday mornings.

And this latest story proves again that the ONE and the ONLY problem is the government/taxslaver bailout. Had AIG - and the est of them - been allowed to go totally bust with zero taxslaver rescues, it would in all likelihood have been the LAST time such an event took place.

Instead, such events will now continue with regularity(about every twenty years seems to be the timetable) as they always have!

Rumpl4skn:
Okay, so now larger light bulbs are beginning to illuminate over my head.
9/11 as a purely financial coup..... ...read on

Great overview post. Nailed it.

So, tracking back over the thread, some
very, very interesting dots are connecting:

Quote:

ATM:
With IPO cash dried up, investor confidence down and layoffs underway,
2001 would have been tough for financial services......
Then came Sept. 11. ....

...substantial files were destroyed [on 9/11, including] the agency's major
inquiry into the manner in which investment banks divvied up hot shares
of initial public offerings during the high-tech boom.

Hombre:
One of the Bush administrations first acts upon re-election... allowed for
INVESTMENT BANKS, to carry far more debt on their books than
previously allowed under the old REGULATION.

This turned out to be Lehman Bros undoing...
it wasn't by accident because they were ENCOURAGED to take it on.
At the time of their demise.. ...NOBODY willing to extend ANY CREDIT
.....read on

Quote:

Rumpl4skn:
Speaking of connecting dots - let's not forget the very first place that
Pres Dubya flew directly to right after the My Pet Goat episode on 9/11,
while the country was "under attack" - Offut AFB, and supposedly a
meeting with Warren Buffett, the unabashedly admitted owner of the
mysterious white plane seen flying over Shanksville that day....
.....read on

Quote:

Fintan:
The 9/11 event was just one step on a path that was thirty to forty years
duration and that aimed to use the Baby Boomers' capital as a springboard
to globalization.... .....read on

_________________Minds are like parachutes.
They only function when open.

Last edited by Fintan on Tue Feb 09, 2010 3:43 pm; edited 4 times in total

Wow lol...excellent dot connections guys. Now its time to consider (again, and gladly so) 9/11 in a new light. Seems as though we'll look back to even today and wonder boy....we sure missed the mark. Amazing how much we're learning still about an event such as 9/11, definitely going to see the attack in a newer context now.

"...the subject which will be of most importance politically is Mass Psychology. ... The populace will not be allowed to know how its convictions were generated. ... As yet there is only one country which has succeeded in creating this politician’s paradise.”
- Bertrand Russell, The Impact of Science on Society, 1960.

Not to mention, the categorized misdirections.

MILITARY: Rumsfeld's 'contributions', the references to Operation Northwoods, Cheney's war games, Operation Iraqi Liberation (OIL), no fighter intercepts. "It had to be a heavy military operation."
FINANCIAL: Larry Silverstein's insurance of the towers, the Put Options, Cheney and Halliburton contracts. The 'small change' money diversions that meant little, but became the focus of monetary investigations. Even though true, definitely worthwhile investments that did their job. How many millions of $ worth of put options left unclaimed are worth the grand prize of potentially a $200 trillion heist?

Not that any or all of those are necessarily lies, but all are deliberate misdirections, like the magician's gorgeous assistant. You're looking at the tits instead of the hands.